After the news of the upcoming settlement of some antitrust issues between the EC Commission and Microsoft, some reactions from the FSFE. It would seem that my concerns in http://piana.eu/en/ms_undertaking have been confirmed.
Microsoft settlement leaves Free Software in the cold
The European Commission yesterday announced a preliminary agreement with Microsoft. The deal is supposed to settle an antitrust investigation about the company's dominant position in the web browser market. The Commission is also ready to strike a deal on interoperability. The goal is to allow rival products to work with Microsoft's applications on the desktop.
It was yesterday in the Herald Tribune, but the news was lingering around even before. Really soon the European Commission will finalize a settlement with Microsoft, possibly closing two big antitrust issues: the tying of the browser with Microsoft Windows and the withholding of interoperability information. I have had the opportunity to comment on the proposal of Microsoft earlier this August, because the Commission has formally asked the opinion of FSFE, which is an interested third party in the procedure. I hope things have improved from then, because there were serious gaps in the proposed commitment.
The point is that the current Commission is going to step down in a few weeks, and Commissioner Kroes – who has an incredibly good track record on the Microsoft case – might feel the urgency to close everything behind her, leaving the office empty and her case teams without a case. But at which conditions?
To use my good friend Jeremy Allison's words, will we be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
Today the Free Software Foundation Europe has announced its request to be admitted as an intersted third party in the investigation that the Commission is undergoing on the tying of Microsoft Internet Explorer in various issues of Microsoft Windows (from 98 to Vista).
FSFE has been active since 2003 in the antitrust activities of the Commission, one of which led to the seminal case T-201/04 Microsoft vs. Commission and to the publication of the interoperability information to the benefit of the Free (open source) Software community.
The Commission has served a statement of objection to Microsoft following the complaint by Opera Software on abuses in the field of web browsers. I planned to write something on this blog when the news spread, but things have accumulated and I could not find enough time.
An interesting post by Mitchell Baker, followed up by another post by Georg Greve, has brought me back to the topic. I don't want to write another story (the two references above are quite complete and accurate), just provide an initial Q&A session on what are we speaking about.
During these days a great interest has been received by the article on OOXML, which has gatered an unforeseeable quantity of trafic. In two days more than 2,000 visitors from all over the World. This has triggered my curiosity.
